An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  Except this quarry is prepared for her.

  I wait until she comes around a parked car, until she’s upon me, before I stop her by extending a demanding palm and saying, “Can you spare some change? I’m terribly hungry.”

  Her body reacts before her face, a lapse of a few seconds, recoiling. She practically lands on the blue Nissan to her left. The eyebrows lift, her lower jaw drops, her lips thin out, her cheeks flush puce. She uses the car as a support, leans on it with outstretched hand. It’s then that I notice she’s younger than she first appeared, a tall eight-year-old, probably.

  I wonder if I went too far, but no, her recovery is quick.

  Her eyes smile first, bright girl. She breaks out giggling. Her laughter comes at me as if by catapult, and her gaze holds me transfixed. She examines me with mirth. I grin.

  Her fidgeting mother across the dividing bitumen doesn’t seem to be appreciating our peculiar scene and its urban charm. Her anxiety is palpable across this great distance. She pulls her five-year-old close, her right arm encircling the little girl’s hips.

  “You have blue hair,” my girl says.

  In an effusive gesture, I reach into my handbag and hand her all the paper money I have—everything I have except for what’s in my pocket, where I keep my real money in case my purse gets stolen. I end up giving her just a little more than the price of museum admission. I’m not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

  Beaming and preening, the girl counts the notes with the nimble fingers of a Beiruti moneychanger. She turns around, still counting, and begins walking back to her mother.

  “Stay in school,” I tell her.

  “It’s the holiday break,” she replies without looking up or back, engrossed with her bounty.

  I tuck in a strand of blue hair, adjust my scarf, and continue on my way.

  In one of these side alleys, I can’t remember exactly which, I had a humiliating experience that loiters in my memory, almost seventy years later. The recalled event no longer causes me much pain. I must have been a few months past four years old; my mother was second-trimester pregnant with my half brother the eldest. We were hurrying home, she dragging me by the hand. She walked with complete concentration and no little consternation. I couldn’t understand then, nor would I for a long time, her terror of being a disappointment to her husband, to his family and hers. Like most of us, she was suckled on the milk of patriarchy (the courage of men, the fidelity of women). She sincerely believed that the world curdled if her husband held his breath, and if his every whim wasn’t met, the universe itself turned to ash.

  I still remember my hasty footsteps that day, their uncertainty, my sturdy brown-and-cream shoes of rubber and cloth, recently bought but long outdated. We traveled this path regularly, but that one time was different. Whether she was going to be tardy, wouldn’t be on time to cook his dinner, finish cleaning, iron his nightshirt, or something else, I don’t know. I know that it was still light, so he couldn’t have reached home yet. I know that I could concentrate only on her calves, how they slid like tectonic plates with each step, and not on the familiar sights of my surroundings. She was running late, but not running because of her condition; passersby would have brooked none of that, would have felt obliged to protect my half brother the fetus from his irresponsible mother.

  More people walked these streets then, many more.

  In my mind, as I walk these streets now, I see her creamy calves as they were then, the calves of Hera or Athena in Rubens’s The Judgment of Paris. I conjure up the sway of her black skirt’s hem, its billowing below the saddle-shaped hollows of the backs of her knees.

  As I walk these streets now, I note how much taller the buildings are today, most of them built in the fifties and sixties, how much taller I am now.

  I remember I was panicking then. I needed to pee. I kept telling her that I couldn’t wait until we reached home. I must have imagined that she, sorceress that she was, could conjure a toilet for me. Unlike Lot’s wife, she wouldn’t look back, kept her steady gaze forward, toward her Mecca. She needed to urinate as well, she told me as we kept moving. She always needed to in her condition, but she was going to wait until she reached our apartment. She always did. If she could, so could I.

  I must have begun to cry. I must have stumbled. I must have done something, because other people showered us with worried glances, some with disdain. She stopped our forward progress. Must I always make demands, make a scene? Why couldn’t I behave like normal children? My hand still in hers, she pulled me toward an alley between a couple of two-story ocher buildings. Severing our connection, she waved me away with a flapping hand. “There,” she told me, “do it there, and do it quickly.”

  I may have been surprised or shocked at her pronouncement. I should have been one or the other, but I don’t recall. I ran into the alley as she stood guard with her back to me. Fearing I would be noticed by a passerby, I sneaked through the gate of one of the buildings. Behind a large flowering bougainvillea, half obscured under its panoply of red, I crouched.

  A woman in a dark dress and a dark, hair-covering scarf screamed at me and called me names. I had assumed no one could see me. I’d looked around before beginning my desecration, but I hadn’t noticed the upper-floor balcony on which she stood. “Get out of here,” she kept yelling, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to stop peeing. I wasn’t able to meet her gaze either, or her fury. Her voice rose and her curses grew more vivid. My glance dawdled on the continental puddle forming in the soil below me.

  By the time I was presentable enough to look up, my mother stood above me, looking more perplexed than angry, but only for an instant. When the balcony woman began cursing her and her parenting techniques, my mother unleashed a litany of imprecations so impressive that the woman turned red and speechless. The mute rude woman held on to the railing with a deathly grip, as if my mother had the power to blow her off the balcony. Below this balcony where the woman once reigned, an escutcheon depicting sheaves of wheat was carved into the stone, a make-believe crest that must have once been the same ocher color but had blackened, collecting the city’s soot and grime in its grooves.

  My mother prodded me back onto the street, grasped my hand once more, and continued her march back home. She ignored me the rest of the way, but she mumbled to the sky, to herself. She didn’t hit me, she didn’t backhand the top of my head, but she was furious. She was a one-handed gesticulating fury on the go.

  I’m unsure which of the two added the most fuel to her fire: that I embarrassed her, the woman thinking she was an imperfect mother, or that I interrupted her speedy stride, her husband thinking she was an imperfect wife. I remember being horrified throughout the return, my eyes glued to two spots on my left shoe, two wet spots on the cream-colored cloth, not the brown rubber. How would I explain to my mother?

  I am marching back to my mother’s house. I can’t say the march is fully unconscious. I’d considered the idea this morning, but I hadn’t formulated a plan or made a firm decision. I’d been thinking about seeing my mother, and some muscle memory in my legs seems to have responded. My feet have been tortuously leading me with an uncertain pace in that general direction. As in many a fairy tale, I must end up there. Jung would have been unsurprised.

  I’m not sharpening my knife, nor am I fluffing welcoming pillows. I should mention that I’m not fluffing pillows to kill her with either. I’m not planning anything. There will be no resolution, no epiphany; and most probably I won’t understand more than I do now. I guess I don’t want her skirl of terror to be my last memory of her. My intention—my goal—is simple.

  I feel that I missed an opportunity at our last get-together, that I flubbed a pregnant moment. That was a pregnant moment, wasn’t it? Should I have said something to her?

  “It’s me, Mamma, me.”

  Should I have quoted Milton, what the daughter, Sin, says to her father, Satan: “Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem / Now in thine eye so foul?”

 
; Should I have slapped her?

  Everything seems sharp, slick, and shiny after the rain. Some rust collects on the dead leaves of a tree that I can’t name. If she screams again when she sees me, I’ll kill her.

  Instead of seeing her, I should go home and put Sebald away in the maid’s room.

  I am proud that I finished the Austerlitz project. I consider it one of the best Holocaust novels. I have to say that much of what is being written about the Holocaust these days seems to be directed at the petite bourgeoisie. I find that when a subject has been heavily tilled, particularly something as horrifying as the Holocaust, anything new should force me to look with fresh eyes, to experience previously unexperienced feelings, to explore the hitherto unexplored. When I first read Primo Levi, my body shivered and spasmed at the oddest of moments for a week. I couldn’t read Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen without clutching the edge of my desk. But then it took years, wading through mostly melodramatic books until I came across Kertész’s Fateless, to feel challenged once more.

  Kertész, like Levi and Borowski, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and he’s the only one of the three who hasn’t killed himself—not yet, at least. In 1951, Tadeusz Borowski, all of twenty-eight years old, opened a gas valve and put his head in the oven. The Gestapo had arrested him, a non-Jew, for surreptitiously printing his poetry.

  Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.

  Two of my favorite books are The Emigrants and Ota Pavel’s How I Came to Know Fish. What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it indirectly; I don’t recall the word being mentioned in either. Both refuse to soil grief with sentimentalism, and so they are devastating.

  Grief is difficult to approach directly and must be courted obliquely. Very few of us are able to write about a tragedy without getting lost in the refractions of blinding tears. It seems to me that we must heed Bushy’s advice in Richard II, and Slavoj Žižek’s for that matter, and look awry.

  Does grief make us lose short wavelength cones as well, make us less able to distinguish the color blue?

  I wonder whether Hannah, in her last year, gazed directly at her life and was overwhelmed. Could she have saved herself had she looked awry?

  From Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus:

  Even the trees you planted as children

  Long since grew too heavy, you could not sustain them.

  The first time I saw Hannah was in my mother’s apartment. When my ex-husband’s family arrived to ask officially for my hand in marriage, she tagged along. I noticed her that day, though I didn’t notice much; I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday, too involved in books, schoolwork, and delusions.

  I admit here that before that day I hadn’t thought much of its possible consequences. I knew, was told, that this was a marriage proposal and my future husband’s family was visiting to measure me, to judge me, that I must comport myself with some dignity, but I hadn’t thought it through. I had no older sister who had gone through the procedure, no older cousins as models.

  For example, I hadn’t realized that marriage meant I’d be taken out of school. If I had, I would have asked quite a few more questions in class. I was a moth forcibly peeled from its chrysalis to face the world’s harsh lights and frightening storms.

  I didn’t understand what my options were. If I had, I would have paid more attention, would have asked more questions of the nitwit.

  I would have shoved his pretentious pipe down his throat while he puffed it.

  My ex-husband had the first virtue of Stendhal’s time, as Count Mosca explains to the delicious Duchess in The Charterhouse of Parma: “The first virtue of a young man today—that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its power—is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.”

  That’s the fool I married, bless his rancid soul. In this case, you can also add, to lack implicitly a sense of either humor or honor; oh, and to be unable to earn an income, and to be content with his functional illiteracy, and to be a congenital coward. He was filled with virtues—overfilled, you might say.

  When he and I were left alone to have a chat and get to know each other in the tiny living room, it took the impotent insect more than twenty minutes to have the courage to say anything (“You look nice”). Doused in uncomfortable silence, we sat there, our shifting eyes covering much ground but not meeting. I exaggerate little when I say that every conversation we ever had thereafter began with a silence that lasted a good twenty minutes.

  Throughout our marriage, we would go for weeks without exchanging more than perfunctory communications, sharing little but the bewildered quiet.

  And you think that I am lonely now? Heavens.

  I wish I’d listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

  I’m not so self-centered as to believe that my marriage was the most horrific or that my ex-husband was the worst. He never laid a hand on me (he would have had to stand on a stepladder to do so) or caused me physical pain. I have come across worse men. I also know that my marriage was by no means unique, nor uniquely Beiruti. In the concise words of Madame du Deffand, who, like me, was married and almost immediately separated, “Feeling no love at all for one’s husband is a fairly widespread misfortune.”

  But enough about him.

  I noticed Hannah that day because of two things: she ate and she was happy. She devoured everything she was offered. My mother or I would bring out a tray of homemade sweets, chocolates, or candy-covered almonds, and she didn’t hesitate, blink, or demur. The other guests would pretend to consider whether they should take more, hem and haw before helping themselves, but not Hannah. She thanked us profusely for every offering before gobbling it down. When I said, “Please, take two,” she did.

  My dear, dear Hannah.

  Yes, and she was happy. She didn’t talk much, but she seemed elated to be included, almost as if she were the groom. If not for conventions, mores, and manners, she would probably have jumped across the room and given me a hug, welcoming the new bride into her world. She lavished my ex-husband’s family and mine with joy.

  She was there for both the engagement and the evening that passed for my wedding. What endeared her to me was that two days after I moved into my apartment she was the first to pay me a visit. I say me, and not we, because my ex-husband hated her. She was oblivious to his loathing, and to tell the truth, she was mostly oblivious to him. Until her slip into the chasm at the end of her life, Hannah had an uncanny ability to simply ignore unpleasantness, and my ex-husband was nothing if not simply unpleasant. I don’t know when she concluded that he was irrelevant, but it was early on, long before I did. She mentioned him only twice in her journals: the first time, she likened him to a porter at the airport, which in my opinion was an extraordinarily apt description; the last was when he left me and she called him a dog, a “scruffy, mangy mongrel” to be exact.

  When she first came to the apartment that day, I went into the kitchen to make her a cup of coffee and she followed. As I ground the beans, she bent her head and I felt her brow ripple my hair in a caress. “He’s such a cranky fellow, your little husband,” she whispered, “but don’t worry, I’ve known him since he was a child, and he’s harmless.” Her eyebrows, as was their wont whenever she thought she was being mischievous, flicked up and down a few times, begging for approval.

  Of course she ended up teaching me how to brew a kettle of coffee, how many spoons of grounds, how much sugar, how much cardamom. We stumbled into friendship. She was the first person who wished to have me in her life, the first to choose me.

  Hannah taught me many things. When I was married off, I was unprepared for life. Sometimes I think I’m still unprepared, but that’s a different proposition now. She taught me how to cook, though she wasn’t much better than I. How to knit, though I never cared
to follow through on that. How to sew and how to mend buttons, which I grew quite adept at since losing buttons was a specialty of the impotent one. She slipped me books and magazines.

  She also taught me how to pray, another discipline I didn’t keep up with. In the beginning I was too busy, what with housework, cooking, and educating myself. I had little time for a god who had little time for me. As I matured, I had no use for one. Emmanuel Lévinas suggested that God left in 1941. Mine left in 1975. And in 1978, and in 1982, and in 1990.

  Hannah, on the other hand, was dumbfounded that neither I nor the impotent insect had a prayer rug (he was not so much religious as superstitious), and further so when she realized that my mother hadn’t sent one with me to my new matrimonial home (my mother didn’t have one either). She bought me the prayer rug that became the first thing my feet touch when I get out of bed.

  Hannah wasn’t meticulous about her prayers. She did her best, but if she missed one or two a day, she took it in stride. She hardly ever performed the afternoon prayer since she arrived at the bookstore most days to help close, and then we’d walk home to my apartment together. Summer light or winter dark, she was there through the years, under umbrellas or beaming skies.

  We’d chat as we muddled through the preparation and devouring of the evening meal. One of the images that I can’t forget is of Hannah licking her forefinger and picking crumbs off the tablecloth. She’d sit with me in my reading room, which wasn’t yet as packed with books as it is now, and like a newswire, she’d update me on the adventures of the families, hers and her fiancé’s, my ex-husband’s. Always knitting, she talked and talked while churning out sweaters for all the nieces and nephews of her two families—sweaters that helped her to be loved and to belong.